莱布尼茨与传教士白晋通信记录（一）

1697 年 12 月 2 日，莱布尼茨写给白晋的信

Since there will be work done in France to translate a good number of Chinese books, I beseech Your Reverence to inform me further by what means this will be done, whether there are enough Europeans capable of undertaking it, or whether some Chinese were brought for this task.

由于在法国将有翻译大量中文书籍的工作，我恳请阁下进一步告知我将通过什么方式进行这项工作，是否有足够的欧洲人能够胜任这项工作，或者是否带来了一些中国人协助完成这个任务。

16 98 年 2 月 2 8 日，白晋 写给 莱布尼茨的信

The most important point to which we mean to apply ourselves is their chronology, which we will try to establish with all the thoroughness and precision possible. For this effect we intend to make a solid critique of the principal authors who wrote their histories and their chronicles, as according to your plan. After this we will work on their natural and civil history, on their physics, their ethics,their laws, their politics, their arts, their mathematics, and their medicine, which is one of the subjects on which I am convinced that China can furnish us with some of the best information. I speak of it this way because I am more attached to it than to any other. I even already have many notes on the above that I am taking back with me since I have not had the leisure to systematize them as I wished. I only left in the hands of Abbot Bignon the translation of a small treatise on the pulse which is in the front of the Chinese herbal which I put in the king's library.Father le Gobien has the rough copy of this translation along with the translation of the preface to this herbal, in which one can see all the design and economy of this work which is a complete corpus of the natural history of China.

我们打算应用的最重要的一点是他们的年表，我们将尽可能彻底和准确地建立这个年表。为了达到这个目的，我们打算按照你的计划，对撰写他们的历史和编年史的主要作者进行严格的批评。在这之后，我们将研究他们的自然史和民俗史，研究他们的物理学、伦理学、法律、政治、艺术、数学和医学，这是我确信中国可以为我们提供一些最佳信息的主题之一。我之所以这样说，是因为我对它的感情比对其他任何东西都要深。我甚至已经有了许多关于上述问题的笔记，我要把它们带回去，因为我没有闲情逸致按自己的意愿把它们系统化。我只把我放在国王图书馆的中草药（指《本草纲目》？）前面的一篇关于脉搏的小论文的译文留在了比农院长的手中。戈比恩神父有这篇译文的粗略副本，还有这篇中草药的序言的译文，从这篇序言中可以看出这部作品的所有设计和经济性，它是中国自然史的一个完整语料库。

16 99 年 9月19日，白晋 写给 莱布尼茨的信

As to our intended designs in working for the conversion of the Chinese, of drawing from this nation all that can serve toward the perfection of our sciences and our arts in order to communicate it to our scholars, in as much as we had already formed for ourselves nearly the same plan that you have proposed.

至于我们为中国人的皈依而努力的计划，以及从这个国家汲取一切可以帮助我们完善我们的科学和艺术的东西，以便将它传达给我们的学者的计划，与您提出的计划几乎不谋而合。